“The church shouldn’t be a taillight behind progress,” she adds, paraphrasing King, “but a headlight leading civilization to higher levels of understanding.”

If you want to find out more about Elizabeth A. Johnson and her theological writing and how important that is, you should first read an article from four years ago at Buzz Feed

Feminism In Faith: Sister Elizabeth Johnson's Challenge To The Vatican

Widely considered one of the architects of Catholic feminist theology, the 72-year-old nun and professor has often clashed with institutional leaders — including the future pope — in her fight for equality in the clergy.

If you want a motive for looking at it, it presents the criminal Cardinal, Bernard Law, being typically awful and why the inquisitorial campaign against Elizabeth A. Johnson was a fittingly emblematic event of the two worst papacies of the 20th and early 21st centuries, the one of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.   

“You say Mary is too passive. Isn’t obedience the greatest virtue?”

This was one of 40 questions sent to Elizabeth Johnson by a cardinal when she was up for a tenure-track position at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., in September 1987. A respected scholar for decades, Johnson found her application rubber-stamped by every committee within the school, yet still needed approval from the Vatican's powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Given that she had written an article questioning the traditional view of Mary as humble and obedient, further rubber-stamping was not guaranteed.

The cardinal interrogating her was Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI.

Though Johnson dutifully answered each query, Ratzinger was still not satisfied. He proceeded to take the extraordinary measure of calling every cardinal in the United States to come to Washington to interrogate her on the content of the article. Johnson was the first female faculty member to come up for tenure at CUA, and the first to be subjected to an examination by the cardinals.

At the initial meeting, the hall was filled with men in black garb, gold chains across their chests, and priests at each of their sides. Johnson was the only woman in the room. “There were these men and they had all the power. I was vulnerable and at their mercy,” Johnson remembers. “There was patriarchy using its power against me, to deprive me of what, in fairness, I should have been given." Twenty-five years later, the recollection still brings waves of sadness and anger across her face.

“I kept thinking that in another century, they would be lighting the fires outside."

I don't have time to go through the entire piece, which includes the passage that I used as a title, but this part at the very end, giving her reason for remaining in the Catholic Church which has been guilty of so much injustice to women and others is worth thinking about.

After 30 years of advocating for reforms in the church’s teachings on women, how does Johnson remain patient with the hierarchy? “Partly by blocking it out! You’ll go crazy if you don’t."

She picks up a small picture frame from her desk, and shows me a photo she took while teaching in South Africa in the late 1980s. Apartheid was still the law of the land, Nelson Mandela sat in prison, and army tanks were positioned on every street corner.

Walking by a pastel-colored building in Cape Town, Johnson noticed that it had been defaced with very thick, black paint. “Hang Mandela,” the wall read. Johnson invites me to look closer at the photo. Someone had used a pencil to add a small, but mighty preposition, transforming the graffiti to read “Hang On Mandela.”

“Someone took and turned that message in the darkest of days,” Johnson says, tearing up at the memory. She saw this sign just before returning to the United States to be interrogated by the cardinals. “That picture has become my answer to why I stay in the church.”